Conversations For Transformation

Essays By Laurence Platt

Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard

And More

Beach Gone!

Diamond Oaks, Oakville, California, USA

March 4, 2008

I am indebted to the Chief's communicator who inspired this
conversation.

When a river engulfs a beach on miles of seashore, it's like the canary
eating the cat: it's not supposed to happen. But land does
get taken by water. Just ask the residents of Banda Aceh: the tsunami
wasn't supposed to happen. When the Keurbooms River took Lookout Beach,
one of my beaches, that wasn't supposed to happen either.

The high school through college years are the most intense study years
for young people. When each academic year ended, a completely new
opportunity awaited: freedom. In retrospect and at first glance, it's
easy to see what made those
summer holidays
so great. After the long cloistered hours of intense study was over,
the suddenly unfettered freedom of the
holidays
was the eagerly
anticipated
reward.

It certainly looked that way. Actually it's more than that: for all
intents and purposes, without question it was that way.
Freedom was something that happened to us. When the
academic year ended, we simply dived into freedom, so to speak. Freedom
was out there, and what we did was get ourselves there (wherever
there was - in this case evidently it was on Lookout
Beach) and immerse ourselves in it as if we were, in an appropriate
metaphor, diving into the ocean.

Listening As Access To Possibility

Popular music has always provided the soundtrack for my life. Once any
particular chapter of my life is complete, years later when I hear the
music which ruled the charts back in the day, I'm drawn by
association right back into the experience I was having at
the time I first heard the music.

The soundtrack of my life during the first halcyon
summer holiday
at Lookout Beach Plettenberg Bay was hands down unquestionably no
doubt about it The Beatles
Abbey
Road.
It was, after the
breakthroughSergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, their second
concept album in which breaks between tracks and sides
were completely arbitrary and basically non-existent. It was one
seamless whole.

As a
monastery
in which to discover who you really are, there's nothing quite like
music. In Plettenberg Bay I listened to
Abbey Road,
as did everyone else. It was the soundtrack of their lives too. But
later, much much later, I came to appreciate, by realizing what I
didn't do, I hadn't ever listened to
Abbey Road.
I came to see I hadn't listened to anything else, for that matter,
either. What I did do by default, rather, was hear.

The distinction is both subtle and profound. Hearing
is listening without any responsibility, without any ownership. At
worst, hearing is simply
eardrums'
automatic sensory reaction to soundwaves,
machinery
which doesn't require the presence of
who you really are.
At best, it's paying attention. Listening is hearing
with creativity, with responsibility, with intention, with bringing
your
Self
to bear on the matter. And the thing is this: when you
hearAbbey Road,
obviously it's The Beatles creating the music. But when you
listenAbbey Road,
it's you creating the possibility of The Beatles
creating the music. I didn't fully appreciate that until at
least a decade later and the
inexorablemeeting with Werner
Erhard.

From False Cause To Creation

And then, in December of 2007, the Keurbooms River rose up and
swallowed Lookout Beach, my Lookout Beach, ALL of it ...
just ... like ... that.

You'd expect your old clothes to disappear into the past. You'd
even expect your old cars to disappear. But ordinarily you
don't
anticipate
an entire beach disappearing. Beaches have "eternal"
already alwaysetched
into them. So if, as in the case of Lookout Beach, they disappear,
there's a sense of jarring, a sense of dislocation. It
confronts your very sense of what's real and what's
permanent. It confronts the very question of the
cause of experience: if the beach is the cause of the
experience I had there, and then the beach disappears, then if
experience is permanent, did I have the experience I had there, or not?
And if it wasn't me who had the experience I had there, then who did?

When the Keurbooms River took Lookout Beach, it took something massive
from my past, something significant from my
epistemology.
It completely obliterated the stage, never to be visited ever again, on
which I had all those wonderful experiences filled with all those great
feelings, filled with all the wide-eyed excitement of
discovering life newly.

But it wasn't Lookout Beach which gave me those experiences. Lookout
Beach is gone. All of it. Yet the experience I had there
for the first time is fresh today, fresher than ever, fresher than even
when I was there. It wasn't Lookout Beach which caused those great
times to happen. Neither could the mighty beach obliterating Keurbooms
River take those experiences away.

Lookout Beach is gone, and with it the false cause of my
experience is gone too. It was I who created the possibility of these
great feelings and this experience of freedom then, and I can recreate
them again now and any time I want to.